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NEW APPROACHES TO
BYZANTINE HISTORY AND CULTURE

Environment and
Society in Byzantium,
650–1150
Between the Oak and the Olive
Alexander Olson
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture

Series Editors
Florin Curta
University of Florida
FL, USA

Leonora Neville
University of Wisconsin Madison
WI, USA

Shaun Tougher
Cardiff University
Cardiff, UK
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture publishes high-quality
scholarship on all aspects of Byzantine culture and society from the fourth
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The core of the series is original scholarly monographs on various
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 Alexander Olson

Environment and
Society in Byzantium,
650-1150
Between the Oak and the Olive
Alexander Olson
Independent scholar
Burnaby, BC, Canada

ISSN 2730-9363        ISSN 2730-9371 (electronic)

New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture
ISBN 978-3-030-59935-5    ISBN 978-3-030-59936-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59936-2

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 Acknowledgments

The process of writing this text, from early research questions to the final
manuscript, was essentially completed on the same laptop between 2013
and 2020. However, the finished book is the culmination of work across
various contexts and involved the help of many individuals. Time in librar-
ies, conversations with professors, suggestions from various academics,
multiple readings and edits, discussions and presentations at several con-
ferences, and email correspondence with editors and publishers have all
allowed me to produce something that would have been beyond my abil-
ity by myself. Because of these experiences, I am indebted to numer-
ous people.
Starting the project in Madison, Wisconsin, I was, as a starving gradu-
ate student living in an apartment with a wonderful lakeview, fortunate
enough to meet and learn from several people. Among them are Jeffrey
Beneker, William Aylward, Marc Kleijwegt, Laird Boswell, Bill Cronon,
Karl Shoemaker, Elizabeth Hennessy, and the late David Morgan, all of
whom provided wonderful opportunities for edification and contributed
ideas or suggestions that became part of this book. Rick Keyser kindly read
several clunky chapter drafts and generously guided me through the grow-
ing field of medieval environmental history. Elizabeth Lapina graciously
gave her time and yielded much valuable advice on the manuscript along
the way. Tony Pietsch, Neal Davidson, and Derek Taira provided helpful
questions and suggestions. Leslie Abadie worked miracles on a regular
basis and allowed me to keep the little sanity I have.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Paolo Squatriti magnanimously supported my early and vague ques-

tions about medieval environmental history, often with plenty of humor.
Professor Ben Graham was unsparing in his sharing of bibliography and
ideas concerning pre-modern olive cultivation. John Haldon kindly
invited me to a symposium on history and the environment, the experi-
ence of which further clarified ideas for this work. I also wish to express
my gratitude to those who pointed me in the direction of medieval his-
tory back in my undergraduate days at Simon Fraser University: Paul
Dutton taught me that we learn much from the little details that pre-
modernity has left us; and to my friend Dimitris Krallis who opened the
door to Byzantium, and showed me that there was much more to see
than I had previously thought (and made microbrews a staple of my life
in the process). Aleksandar Jovanović was a rewarding conversationalist
on Byzantine topics back in Canada, and he helped me with some chal-
lenging Greek.
I am eternally grateful to Leonora Neville who supervised this project
in its dissertation form, and then encouraged me to turn it into a book.
She was a superb advisor and I always found myself leaving her office
encouraged and enthusiastic about understanding people who lived in the
medieval Roman Empire. Since then, her continued recommendations,
and help with some tricky sources, have further improved this work. Her
confidence and desire to creatively approach Byzantine studies did much
to make this book more than a hypothetical project.
I also would like to thank the editorial board and production team for
the New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture series at Palgrave
Macmillan. I also wish to thank the three anonymous readers whose com-
ments greatly improved this work, particularly its ideas concerning peas-
ants and olives.
Several institutions have assisted me greatly through this process.
The History Department at the University of Wisconsin was an excel-
lent environment in which to pursue this project. The dissertation, from
which this book emerged, drew on research supported by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The Graduate School and
the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison enabled two years’ worth of
writing thanks to an ample supply of funding from the Wisconsin
Alumni Research Foundation.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

My family has always been encouraging of my academic pursuits.

Although my grandparents did not receive higher education themselves,
they always supported learning, be it about animals, maps, or fiction, and
did a lot to ensure that their children and grandchildren could go to uni-
versity. I owe much to my Mom and Dad, not only for their unconditional
love, but for exposing me to books and telling me that spelling was impor-
tant. My brother Michael, himself with a degree in history, generously
gave feedback on an early chapter draft when he had more pressing busi-
ness. Most of all, I want to thank my wife Danielle LeBlanc, who made the
map, gave feedback on the original dissertation and challenging parts of
the book, and encouraged me in everything from moving to the Midwest
for a graduate degree to submitting a book proposal. She had prodigious
patience throughout this project from initial airheaded ruminations con-
cerning trees to last minute edits of a nearly published book. I have been
truly fortunate to find a wonderful partner who doubles as an exceptional
writer and an excellent driver on harrowing back roads in the Mediterranean
countryside.
And so the project ends with me back in Canada, working as a bureau-
crat who experiences weekends and still gets to do research and write in
order to help people. The lights are not on as late now, the apartment is
bigger, and I am not starving. My son Alastair seems more intrigued by
dirt than trees at the moment, but he reminds me all over again that pine-
cones, pebbles, and tree stumps are interesting. This book is dedicated to
him and Danielle.
 viii
Acknowledgments

Fig 1 The Aegean littoral

 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Middle Byzantium’s Environmental and Economic

Antecedents 25

3 An Evergreen Empire 49

4 The Decline of the Olive in Middle Byzantium 95

5 Rearranging Woods and Scrub137

6 The Return of the Olive177

7 The Devil Chops Wood213

8 Conclusion233

Bibliography239

Index255

ix
 Abbreviations

Life of Lazaros The Life of Lazaros of Mt. Galesion: An Eleventh-­Century

Pillar Saint. Byzantine Saints Lives in Translation 3.
Translated by Richard P. H. Greenfield. Washington,
DC, 2000.
Life of Luke The Life and Miracles of St. Luke. Translated by Connors,
Carolyn and Robert Connors. Brookline, MA: Hellenic
College Press, 1994.
Life of Nikon The Life of Saint Nikon: Text, Translation, and
Commentary. Edited by Dennis Sullivan. Brookline,
MA, 1987.
Life of Paul of Latros Life of Paul of Latros, edited by Hippolyte Delehaye,
“Der Latmos,” in Milet: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen
und Untersuchungen seit dem Jahre 1899 3.1, edited by
Theodor Wiegand. Berlin, 1913.

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter demonstrates that olive and oak are useful objects
for studying environmental, economic, social, and cultural changes. It
emphasizes that due to its environmental requirements, frequent men-
tion in textual sources, use in construction and agrarian economies, and
long lifespan, the oak is an excellent means for studying relationships
between premodern people and their environments. The chapter also
demonstrates that the olive, due to its strong remains in fossil studies,
archaeologically noticeable oileries, and focus in written works, is also a
useful source for analyzing how human choices have interacted with the
Mediterranean environment. This chapter also presents the available
sources for studying how Middle Byzantium’s environmental history
unfolded in the Aegean Basin. It sets the chronological limits of the study
between 650 and 1150.

Keywords Environmental history • Byzantine history • Land use

• Economy

At some point, probably in the eleventh century, a Byzantine man named

Pantoléôn engaged in the arduous work of clearing a field in northern

© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. Olson, Environment and Society in Byzantium, 650-1150,
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59936-2_1
2 A. OLSON

Greece’s Chalkidike peninsula.1 With an axe he cut down the trees’ trunks,
and then, painfully stooped for long periods of time, dug up roots with a
pick, possibly setting fire to the deadwood in order to expedite the pro-
cess. Perhaps the only aspect of the situation that was positive for this
medieval fellow was the cool weather, as it is most likely that he carried out
this exhausting work that did not yield a meal (at least in the short term)
during the winter when harvests and the vintage were not pressing con-
cerns. Pantoléôn’s relationship with trees was not entirely adversarial
though, despite the fact that he was removing them. In the midst of his
clearing, he noticed a tall evergreen oak and a deciduous oak with excep-
tionally tasty acorns, and he decided to leave these two trees untouched.2
In fact, when all this back-breaking work was complete, these two trees
stood right in the middle of Pantoléôn’s newly cleared field. His choice
was a sensible one. These oaks could provide leaf fodder for goats, acorns
for pigs, possibly even for himself and his family given that these acorns
were mentioned as especially edible. Finally, these two oaks could provide
shade for Pantoléôn and his wife (whose name is not given in the text) if
they took a break from reaping and gathering their field’s cereal.
While the document that provides us with the only known evidence of
Pantoléôn’s existence was focused on determining what lands were owned
by a large monastery, called Iviron (and for that reason the document only
treated this peasant tangentially) the text reminds one that medieval
Romans (hereafter often called “Byzantines”), like most people in the
pre-­industrial Mediterranean, had to pursue their existence next to, and

1
Actes d’Iviron, eds., Jacques LeFort, Nicolas Oikonomides, and Denise Papachryssanthou,
Vassiliki Kravari, and Hélène Métrévéli, vol. II Archives de l’Athos 16 (Paris: P. Lethielleux,
1985), pp. 187, no. 48, lines 4–5. The relevant passage and the translation are as follows.
“…And it comes down to the two trees that have been inscribed, that is the prickly oak and
the edible acorn-bearing oak, and cuts in half the small farm cleared by Pantoléôn, the son-
in-law of Dobrobétés…” διἔρχ(ε)τ(αι) τὰ δυο δένδρ(α) τὰ ἐσφραγισμ(έ)ν(α), ηγουν τὸν
πρινον (καὶ) τὸ ἡμεράδ(ιον), καὶ κόπτ(ει) μέσον τὸ χωρ(άφιον) τὸ ὑλοκωπηθ(ὲν) π(αρὰ)
Παντ(ο)λ(έοντος) γα(μβροῦ) Δοβροβήτ(ου). On page 187 the editors render the word
ἡμεράδιον as an edible acorn-bearing oak. Pantoléôn receives a brief reference in Jacques
LeFort, “The Rural Economy, Seventh-Twelfth Centuries,” in The Economic History of
Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, ed. Angeliki Laiou (Washington,
DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 271, n. 281.
2
Actes de Iviron II, pp. 187, no. 48, lines 4–5 (line 7 in the edition contained in the
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, hereafter referred to as the TLG).
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

often within, woodland.3 Truly, woodland was central to the lives of

Byzantine peasants who represented the vast majority of the population: it
provided food, fuel, and building materials. It was a place in which eco-
nomic decisions were made, social relations expressed, and where much of
the rhythm of daily life transpired. With such importance in mind, if one
really wants to obtain a better understanding of the Byzantine economy,
material culture, and landscapes, then it is necessary to situate these his-
torical actors beside this woodland. This woodland’s form varied consider-
ably across the Byzantine world, ranging from the bushy scrub consisting
of evergreen oak, wild olives, and drought-resistant shrubs that often cov-
ers the drier locales of Greece and Turkey, to the canopied woodland
dominated by deciduous oaks accompanied by handfuls of chestnut,
beech, or fir trees in cooler and wetter areas, to the pine-dominated slopes
of mountains. Regardless of its form, this woodland was very important to
the Byzantines who utilized it on a constant basis. Indeed, Byzantines’
choices and attitudes had significant effects on woodland composition and
scope because they promoted certain arboreal species in its midst. At the
same time, certain types of trees pressured Byzantine cultivators, with vari-
eties such as evergreen oak presenting a formidable challenge to anyone
who did not actively prevent it from spreading into their fields. As the
great Mediterranean historian Fernand Braudel noted in his influential
work on Mediterranean history, people had to work hard to prevent veg-
etation from infiltrating their cultivated spaces.4 His quote was specifically
in reference to Mediterranean agricultural practice in hilly areas, but it
adequately reflects the challenges that Mediterranean farmers face, not
only from working around sharp relief, but from working against the tena-
cious plant life that characterizes the region’s ecology.

3
Recent scholarship has done much to correct the erroneous conception that Byzantine
people were somehow not Roman. For the purposes of this book, when I use the term
“Byzantine” I am describing the inhabitants and culture of the Roman Empire as it existed,
without a gap, from the ancient era into the medieval one. These people called themselves
“Romans,” they called their polity “the Empire of the Romans,” and they represented them-
selves as Romans by means of their fashion, laws, and histories. They were not mistaken in
their self-conception. For the dismantling of claims to the contrary, see Anthony Kaldellis,
Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Greek Identity and the Reception of the
Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Dimitris Krallis,
Serving Byzantium’s Emperors: the Courtly Life and Career of Michael Attaleiates (Cham,
Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
4
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1973), 43.
4 A. OLSON

This interplay between Byzantine people and their physical environ-

ment is the subject of this book, and consequently this work adopts the set
of concerns and interests that are central to the sub-discipline of environ-
mental history. At its most basic level environmental history is, as the
noted practitioner John McNeill defines it, a form of history that includes
the environment as a component of its analysis or story.5 Another promi-
nent scholar in the field, the US historian William Cronon, has implored
environmental historians to figure out nature’s function and significance
for humans,6 and to concentrate on relationships between people and eco-
systems as opposed to modes of production.7 More specific definitions are
possible, although there is disagreement within the field as to what these
definitions should include or exclude.8 Medieval historians, while analyz-
ing very different contexts from those of their Americanist counterparts,
have produced works that recognize how a combination of peoples’ per-
ceptions, values, and material demands shaped their landscape, which in
turn acted on the minds and material conditions of people.9 Highly varied
topics and methodologies are certainly possible in environmental history,
and it is clear that an interest in the interaction between people and their
environment, however defined, greatly enriches any type of historical
study, including those of pre-modern contexts. Yet such works are still

5
John McNeil, “The State of the Field of Environmental History,” Annual Review of
Environment and Resources 35 (2010): 346.
6
William Cronon, “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History,” The
Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1130.
7
Cronon, 1126.
8
For example, Donald, Worster, one of the heavyweights of environmental history, sug-
gested in a canonical work that environmental histories have three layers in their focus: his-
torical changes in the environment; humans’ material and economic interaction with the
environment; and humans’ cultural interaction with nature. See Donald Worster, “Doing
Environmental History,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental
History, ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 293–294.
9
For a great discussion of the dialectic and feedback between people and their environ-
ment in the medieval context, see Richard C. Hoffmann, An Environmental History of
Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially pages 7–15.
For some notable examples of how medievalists have produced environmental histories,
touching on different aspects of the relationships between people and their environments,
see Paolo Squatriti, Water and Society in early medieval Italy, AD 400–1000 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ellen F. Arnold, Negotiating the Landscape: Environment
and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2012).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

relatively few for the medieval European context, and especially rare for
the study of the medieval Roman Empire (hereafter called “Byzantium”).
An all-encompassing environmental history of Byzantium would repre-
sent a considerable undertaking and would probably run several volumes.
As most environmental histories concentrate on a specific topic, this book
focuses specifically on trees and woodland. Indeed, a particular attention
to trees can be beneficial in the realm of environmental history. Some his-
torians have already used trees as a focus of their work, broadening fellow
scholars’ perspectives on specific historical environments, cultures, and
economies in the process.10
Scholars of Byzantium, with one notable exception,11 have not made
the Byzantine interaction with trees a primary subject of their works.
However, several historians have touched on various other themes or
aspects of the Byzantine interaction with woodland or the changing land-
scape history of Byzantium. In several articles, John Haldon has made use
of fossilized pollen samples and historical texts to argue that the Caliphate’s
seventh-century warfare directed against Byzantium led to land abandon-
ment in central Anatolia and a consequent increase in tree cover.12 Another
Byzantinist, Adam Izdebski, has synthesized Byzantine history with
environmental data from the Anatolian portion of the Empire, arguing
that Asia Minor’s landscape became differentiated in the early middle ages,
with changes in the environment arising from land abandonment and

10
For early medieval Italy, see Paolo Squatriti, Landscape and Change in Early Medieval
Italy: Chestnuts, Economy, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); for
modern (and not so modern) Indonesia, see Nancy Lee Peluso, “Fruit Trees and Family
Trees in an Anthropogenic Forest,” in Natures Past: The Environment and Human History,
ed. Paolo Squatriti, 54–102 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007); for mod-
ern California, see Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: a California History (New York: W. W. Norton
and Company, 2013).
11
Archibald Dunn’s work, discussed below.
12
For examples of Haldon’s work on this topic, see John Haldon, “‘Cappadocia will be
given over to Ruin and Become a Desert’: Environmental Evidence for Historically-Attested
Events in the 7th–10th Centuries,” in Byzantina Mediterranea, Festschrift Johannes Koder,
ed. K. Belke et al. (Vienna, 2007), 215–230; Warren J. Eastwood, Osman Gumuscu, Hakan
Yigitbasioglu, John F. Haldon, and Ann England, “Integrating Palaeoecological and
Archaeo-Historical Records: Land Use and Landscape Change in Cappadocia (central
Turkey) Since Late Antiquity,” in Archaeology of the Countryside in Medieval Anatolia, eds.,
Tasha Vorderstrasse and Jacob Roodenberg (Leiden: Nederlands Institut voor het nabije
oosten, 2009); John Haldon et al., “The Climate and Environment of Byzantine Anatolia:
Integrating Science, History, and Archaeology,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 45, no.
2 (2014): 113–161.
6 A. OLSON

shifts to other forms of cultivation in light of the seventh-century’s politi-

cal and economic transformation.13 In essence, these environmentally
inclined works examine the breakdown and adaptation of the Byzantine
state and its ability to harness the region’s agrarian resources in the face of
historical transitions and also climate change. While these works are the
most environmentally informed of any that treat Byzantium, their geo-
graphic and chronological parameters are specific to the Anatolian plateau
in the seventh century, and their analytical focus emphasizes warfare,
plague, state collapse, and climate change as explanations for changes in
vegetative cover.
This book differs from the works mentioned above in several ways.
First, it adopts a longer and later chronological focus: roughly following
an arc between the mid-seventh and the mid-twelfth centuries. Second,
this book’s geographical concern is the Aegean Basin, a region very differ-
ent than the Anatolian plateau. For our purposes, I define the Aegean
Basin (or Aegean littoral) as the ring of lowlands and river valleys that sur-
rounds and empties into the Aegean Sea. The selection of this geographi-
cal delimitation is two-fold. First, as Leonora Neville articulated in a
crucial work regarding Byzantine social history, this region represents the
“core” of the Byzantine Empire, where foreign powers did not effectively
invade and in which the Byzantine government was consistently demon-
strating its sovereignty and made itself felt via the collection of taxes.14
Thus, the Aegean stood in contrast, economically and culturally, to the
outlying border regions which were largely in the hands of co-opted mag-
nates (such as the Caucasus, the interior of the Balkans, and the Adriatic
and Italian provinces of the Empire). Second, the Aegean littoral has a
very different climatic regime and ecology than the other “core” region of
Middle Byzantium, the Anatolian plateau: the area that has received much
more attention from scholars interested in the Byzantine interaction with
the environment, including Haldon and Izdebski.15 The large grasslands

13
Adam Izdebski, A Rural Economy in Transition: Asia Minor from Late Antiquity into the
Early Middle Ages, The Journal of Juristic Papyrology, Supplement 18 (Warsaw: University
of Warsaw, Faculty of Law and Administration; University of Warsaw, Institute of Archaeology;
Fundacja im. Rafała Taubenschlaga, 2013).
14
Leonora Neville, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2–3.
15
For example, see Warren J. Eastwood, Osman Gumuscu, Hakan Yigitbasioglu, John
F. Haldon, and Ann England “Integrating Palaeoecological and Archaeo-Historical Records:
Land Use and Landscape Change in Cappadocia (Central Turkey) Since Late Antiquity,” in
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

and cold winters of the Anatolian plateau are not a feature of the Aegean
world, but a collection of hills, small coastal plains, mild winters, hot sum-
mers, and Mediterranean vegetation is. Environmental differences still
certainly exist within the Basin, some locales being more arid with light
soils and others being comparatively wet with deeper soils.
Despite ecological variation throughout the Aegean littoral, the early
Byzantine period saw an overall expansion in arboreal cover in the region.
However, this story has received far less attention than the tale of postclas-
sical Anatolia’s environmental transformation. A handful of scholars have
acknowledged the littoral’s more wooded environment of the eighth and
ninth centuries, with Archibald Dunn providing further analysis, by means
of both textual sources and studies of fossilized pollen, of later clearance
and the general role of the state in utilizing woodland.16 However, this
story needs to be further fleshed out in order to better appreciate how this
changed environment affected the region’s inhabitants and how they, in
turn, worked with it.
It is this emphasis on how and why people worked with certain trees the
way that they did, that also serves to separate this book from the environ-
mentally inclined scholarly works discussed above. While the works of
Haldon and Izdebski have provided valuable new data, established that
there was a significant change in the amount of arboreal pollen in the air,
and illustrated the role of warfare, cultural shifts, and climate change in
altering the landscape, this book shifts attention to how the environmental
data indicates plants’ opportunism and reflects cultivators’ choices.
Further, this work explores how cultivators adapted to a landscape that
changed on its own in the face of a reduced human presence. Essentially,
it is this book’s contention that certain trees enable another level of

Archaeology of the Countryside in Medieval Anatolia, eds., Tasha Vorderstrasse and Jacob
Roodenberg (Leiden: Nederlands Institut voor het nabije oosten, 2009).
16
A. Dunn, “The exploitation and control of woodland and scrubland in the Byzantine
world,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 6 (1992): 235–298. LeFort acknowledges that
natural vegetation returned to abandoned land in the Byzantine Dark Ages, see Jacques
LeFort, “The Rural Economy, Seventh-Twelfth Centuries,” 269–271. For a brief but impor-
tant argument for reforestation in the postclassical Aegean Basin, see Johannes Koder,
“Historical aspects of a recession of cultivated land at the end of the late antiquity in the east
Mediterranean,” in Evaluation of land surfaces cleared from the forests in the Mediterranean
region during the time of the Roman Empire, eds., Burkhard Frenzel in Palaoklimaforschung,
Palaeoclimate Research, 10 (Stuttgart, 1994), 157–167.
8 A. OLSON

cultural and economic analysis, shedding light on the ideas that shape land
use. These alternative points of focus will receive elaboration further below.
This book’s inquiry into Byzantines’ choices, and how the resultant
economic strategies affected their landscape, has predecessors in the field.
Several agrarian historians (who, given their interests, could fit under the
more recent label of environmental history) have treated at length the
agricultural regimes and preferences of Byzantine cultivators, and their
arguments have import regarding the interaction between people and
their environment. The condensed version of their body of work runs as
follows: monastic and imperial documents provide a picture of an increas-
ingly cultivated landscape in the Aegean basin between the ninth and four-
teenth centuries on account of population growth and monastic and lay
landowners’ quest for profit. These landowners invested in irrigation
works, watermills, vineyards, and large-scale cultivation of cereal in order
to sell agricultural surplus in growing urban centers and thus acquire profit
in the form of coins.17 This trend, combined with population growth, led
to a rise in the amount of cultivated land and a decrease in the amount of
woodland. Other historians have provided a thorough analysis of
Byzantines’ agrarian practices, viticulture, and estate management and the
choices that informed such actions.18 Thus there has been a group of
scholars who have approached key aspects of environmental history in
Byzantium, examining how people worked the land and even altered it.
However, the agrarian historians of Byzantium did not concentrate on the
role of woodland in both the economy and in people’s lives (Dunn is the
exception here), instead treating the topic peripherally. Further, plants’
abilities to improve their profile in a landscape remained neglected.

17
For this general argument, see Alan Harvey, Economic Expansion in the Byzantine
Empire, 900–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially Chap. 4;
Jacques LeFort, “Rural Economy and Social Relations in the Countryside,” Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 47 (1993); Jacques LeFort, “The Rural Economy, Seventh-Twelfth Centuries.”
18
For example, see Michel Kaplan, Les Hommes et la Terre a Byzance du Vie au XIe siècle:
propriete et exploitation du sol (Paris: Sorbonne, 1992); Michel Kaplan, “L’activité pastorale
dans le village byzantin du VIIe au XIIe Siècle,” in Animals and Environment in Byzantium
(7th–12th C.), ed. Ilias Anagnostakis, Taxiarchis G. Kolias, and Eftychia Papadopoulou
(Athens: The National Hellenic Research Foundation/Institute for Byzantine Research,
2011), 407–420; Kostis Smyrlis, “Settlement and Environment in Halkidiki, Ninth to
Fifteenth Century AD,” in Mines, Olives and Monasteries: Aspects of Halkidiki’s Environmental
History, ed. Basil C. Gounaris (Thessaloniki: Epikentro Publishers and Pharos Books, 2015),
109–121.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

Moreover, the agrarian historians had little available archaeology or

environmental proxy data with which to work, almost exclusively making
use of documentary evidence in their analysis of the Byzantine economy
and, at times, its environmental ramifications. While largely unavoidable
when they produced most of their works, a reliance on textual sources
presents serious limitations for understanding middle Byzantine society
and its economy. First, while a gargantuan body of saints’ biographies,
called vitae, and a chain of significant histories and chronicles survive from
Byzantium, texts dealing with landownership, prices, agriculture, and syl-
viculture are very rare, making it hard to draw conclusions about such
topics. Second, as one scholar aptly noted in his book on seventh-century
Byzantium, the Byzantine world in the aftermath of Avar and Arab inva-
sions looked very different from the customary depiction of the world as
passed down from Greco-Roman antiquity.19 Essentially, middle Byzantine
authors (I use the term to describe the period in Byzantine history between
the end of Late Antiquity and the fourth Crusade in 1204, a year marking
a major shift in Byzantine politics and culture)20 were often loathe to write
material that departed from their interests and classical templates, and as a
result mostly neglected the world’s more pedestrian topics and conditions
in the majority of their texts.21 Consequently, a reliance on much of the
textual source base of Byzantium leaves readers with either no image of
the landscape and economy or, at best, a highly skewed one. In addition,
the monastic archival sources upon which so much of the economic his-
torical scholarship of Byzantium is based, present another problem for
historians. The vast majority of that particular body of texts was written
toward the end of the middle Byzantine period and reflected the interests
of a relatively young monastic landowning class that desired a countryside
defined by clear ownership and consisting of productive, orderly estates

19
John Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, rev. edition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 440.
20
Other definitions of when the middle Byzantine period begins are possible, including
600 and 843. Periodization is obviously arbitrary, but it is useful to have a term that describes
the Byzantine world during the period that this book examines, a period that was socially,
culturally, politically, and economically different from that of the ancient world and that of
the thirteenth century.
21
For a good overview of Byzantine historical writing, its classicism, and its preoccupation
with military and political figures and events as opposed to mundane topics, see Leonora
Neville, Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), especially pages 8, 12, and 21–23.
10 A. OLSON

with fields, vineyards, and fruit trees. These monastic record keepers did
not approve of peasant villages’ privileging land use over ownership, nor
were they interested in sharing woodland and scrubland, nor did they
pursue an economy that emphasized subsistence as opposed to coin-­
generating surplus. Despite this large corpus of monastic records, scholars
must remember that the peasants’ security-seeking economy was probably
the predominant one in the Aegean part of Byzantium right until the elev-
enth century. In other words, in order to understand much of middle
Byzantine history, one has to work backwards from this larger body of
sources and place greater emphasis on woodland’s role.
Finally, previous scholarly work, on the rare occasion that it addressed
the interaction between people and the environment in Byzantium, pro-
vided a rather negative depiction of this relationship. For instance, scholars
have claimed that Byzantines viewed mountains and the sea as dangerous
places,22 or that Byzantine people were responsible for significant environ-
mental degradation.23 The latter idea is in line with declensionist narratives
of human-environment interaction that have been popular in the study of
ancient environmental history until fairly recently, often attributing soil
erosion and deforestation in the Mediterranean to ancient Greeks’ and
Romans’ actions.24 This book does not concur with such views.
Thus, scholarship has left several gaps. Because it has often been
restricted to textual evidence, there has been relatively little light shed on
the economies of the eighth- through tenth-century Aegean Basin, includ-
ing the so-called Byzantine “dark ages” for which textual remains are dis-
tinctly meager. The surviving texts have also mainly focused on cereal and
vines to the exclusion of woodland and, surprisingly given the
Mediterranean context, olives. Given the surviving texts’ limitations, how
else can we learn about the choices of Byzantine cultivators? How did such
decision-making work in an absence of significant markets between the
mid-seventh and tenth centuries? Did Byzantine cultivators and peasants

22
For example, see Alexander Kazhdan and Giles Constable, People and Power in Byzantium
(Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982), 41–42.
23
Bernard Geyer, “Physical Factors in the Evolution of the Landscape and Land Use,” in
The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, ed.
Angeliki Laiou (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 38 and 42.
24
For examples of this hypothesis, see Donald J. Hughes, Ecology in Ancient Civilizations
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975); J. Donald Hughes, The
Mediterranean: An Environmental History, Nature and Human Societies (Santa Barbara,
California: ABC-Clio, 2005).
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

develop different preferences as the Empire and its economy changed yet
again in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? Can we possibly get closer to
the experiences and rationale of a figure such as Pantoléôn?
In an attempt to answer such questions and to address these various
lacunae in the scholarship, while at the same time approaching issues of
environmental change with respect for both humans’ economic choices
and for arboreal species’ abilities to increase their own number within a
landscape, this book uses two types of trees as platforms from which to
launch its analysis. While this book broadly treats woodland, it privileges
two particular types of trees, oak (Quercus) and olive (Olea), in order to
look at the ways in which Byzantine society interacted with woodland, and
to see what this interaction can tell us about ecological, economic, and
cultural change in the Aegean littoral between the mid-seventh and mid-­
twelfth centuries. Other varieties of trees are included too, and thus pine,
chestnut, and juniper all make appearances in this book. A reader can
reasonably ask: “why not focus on other varieties of trees, such as tama-
risks, firs, plane trees, and walnuts?” In fact, these species are all useful for
such analysis because humans interacted with them. Examples abound:
Byzantine monastic texts mention plane and fir trees as boundary markers;
Byzantine legislation shows that cedar trees were of great importance for
naval purposes; and botanical properties suggest that figs were perhaps the
most significant arboreal source of calories for the Byzantine population.
However, trees such as pine, fir, tamarisk, or fig simply did not hold the
same level of human interest as oak or olive. For the purposes of this work,
there are several reasons, which will be explained below, as to why Olea
and Quercus will receive scrutiny.
One conceit of this book is that Quercus and Olea are good focal points
for historians who want to examine the interaction between people and
their environment in a preindustrial Mediterranean setting because these
species’ existence in that landscape is contingent on people’s willingness
and ability to support their presence at the expense of other forms of veg-
etation. In other words, when one encounters deciduous oak or domesti-
cated olive in historical Mediterranean contexts, historical human actors
wanted those species to be there, either planting them or supporting them
over alternative forms of vegetation. Furthermore, many Byzantine writers
were helpful in making these trees known to us, specifically mentioning
them in several texts with the distinct labels “drus (δρῦς)” for deciduous
oak, “prinos (πρίνος)” for evergreen oak, and “elaia (ἐλαία)” or various
derivatives of that word for olives. While not necessarily providing further
12 A. OLSON

information that modern scholars may like to have, such as naming specific
olive cultivars, these species’ labels stand in sharp contrast to many other
trees in the Byzantine case, a context in which most arboreal lifeforms
were simply lumped together under the all-encompassing term “tree” or
“dendron (δένδρον)” in Greek. Thus, as far as Byzantine texts are con-
cerned, oak and olive were significant and separate from the ill-defined
amorphous mass of other arboreal varieties.
Quercus and Olea are also talented at making themselves known to pos-
terity, further enabling historical study of these trees and humans’ interac-
tion with them. The olive, provided that humans prune and tend to it, is
a powerful wind pollinator, spreading its seed over large distances and in
significant quantities, and thus it survives very well in fossil pollen studies.
Hence, its pollen signature is an indirect piece of evidence both that Olea
was established in a given locale at a given time and that humans were
pruning and maintaining it. In addition, olives, with the prominent
archaeological remains of people’s interaction with them such as olive
crushers, presses, and amphorae, enable another layer of historical analysis.
Consequently, by concentrating on Olea one can trace long-term shifts in
the economy and the environment that would otherwise be obscured for
those studying the past. In contrast, other human-tended forms of vegeta-
tion such as cereal and the vine do not provide us with the same opportu-
nity given their less detectable pollen signatures and less visible
accompanying agricultural implements.
The Oak, while less capable of dispersing its pollen than the olive, has
its own set of traits that leave prominent footprints in the environmental
record. For example, its deciduous varieties need to be situated in rela-
tively moist soils in order to survive. Such a requirement is useful to bear
in mind because such soils are both the locations from which pollen cores
are extracted and the locations in which agriculture is historically prac-
ticed. For that reason, Quercus’ presence is more reliably traceable in pol-
len studies than many other species, allowing those who study past
environments to be sure of when it was, or was not, present in a local
landscape. In addition, its presence in a pollen study can tell us a lot about
people’s choices regarding how to use such valuable soils in the relatively
dry Mediterranean. Because it competes with the vine and cereals, decidu-
ous oak’s presence is accordingly a useful indicator of human choices
regarding how to use land with richer soils. Another specific utility of
Quercus, as far as historians are concerned, is humans’ long-lasting interest
in that particular genus, an interest evident in its alleged supernatural
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

attributes and role in folklore and in its roles as a provider of fuel, fodder,
and building materials.25 The above factors, when combined, reinforce the
utility of the oak as an important object for shedding light on the interac-
tions, both material and mental, between people and the environment.
Both the olive and the oak live for hundreds of years, much longer than
most other trees, and this lengthy lifespan facilitates another layer of analy-
sis regarding environmental and social transitions in the longue durée.
While Braudel’s magisterial work popularized the useful concept of truly
long-term history, its discussion of the olive treated the tree more as a
constant part of Mediterranean ecology and agriculture, a treatment that
this work hopes to problematize.26 In a sense, these trees can function for
the historian as archival sources, reflecting changes in human interests over
time. Consequently, these species can demonstrate the fluctuating priori-
ties of the Byzantine population that lived around the Aegean Basin as
they found themselves moving from a late antique world of large urban
centers and a massive resource-demanding ancient Roman state to a medi-
eval Roman one of subsistence farmers living with a lean government, and
then finally to the Komnenian period (1081–1185) that included a bigger
population, Italian merchants, growing settlements, and an increasingly
monetized economy.
One can understandably be tempted to attribute changes in the profiles
of arboreal species to climatic fluctuations as opposed to human predilec-
tions or botanical traits. Such an attribution does not appear to work in
the case of the middle Byzantine Aegean. Scientists who have studied the
historical ecology of Anatolian uplands have noted that the major shifts in
the vegetative cover of the region during the period that this book treats
do not seem to have been significantly influenced by climate change.27
Comprehensive analysis of environmental data from the northern Aegean
Basin indicates that fluctuations in temperature occurred throughout the
middle ages, with sea surface temperatures being cooler in the northern
Aegean between 500 and 850, followed by somewhat warmer ­temperatures

25
For further information on people historical interests in the oak, see Chap. 7 of Gregory
Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); James
Frazer, The Golden Bough, 12 vols., (London, 1913).
26
See Braudel, 234 and 236. On another note, he did not discuss the oak at length.
27
S. Bottema and H. Woldring, “Late Quaternary vegetation and climate of Southwestern
Turkey II,” Palaeohistoria 26 (1984): 140; Marleen Vermoere, Holocene Vegetation History
in the Territory of Sagalassos (Southwest Turkey): A Palynological Approach (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2004), 167.
14 A. OLSON

between 850 and 950, trailed by further ebbs and flows between 1000 and
1300.28 Scientists and scholars note that, despite some general overlap
between climatic stability and economic growth, the climate was simply
one factor among many that influenced environmental shifts.29 In the case
of this book’s geographical focus, the lowlands surrounding the Aegean
Sea (a body of water that acts as a moderator of climate), any hypothetical
climatic shifts would have been even less significant than on the highly
elevated Anatolian Plateau or the Macedonian uplands. Based on the cur-
rent level of evidence, it appears that the climate of Greece and the Aegean
lowlands was pretty constant during the early middle ages and that the
changes in vegetation are indicators of human activity rather than climate
change.30 Thus, while I agree that climate change can have massive (even
catastrophic) implications for people and plant life in various times and
places, I privilege people’s choices and botanical agency over climate as
explanations for changes in the vegetative cover of the Aegean Basin dur-
ing the middle Byzantine period.
Thus, given their characteristics, Quercus and Olea act well as objects
that can shed light on changing land use, material culture, and mentalités.
In effect, they allow one to examine the various facets that comprise envi-
ronmental and social history, revealing changes in the economic choices
and strategies of the people who made up the bulk of the Byzantine popu-
lation, and yet receive such scarce mention in the texts: the peasantry. A
focus on these species can move scholars and readers away from a world of
emperors, bishops, armies, and doctrinal disputes and toward a world of
peasants, livestock, provincial elite figures, and monks all living in an active
dialectic with their landscape; a landscape that was not a passive backdrop
to their existence but one that these provincial subjects both shaped and
were influenced by. Finally, it is worth pursuing an environmental history
of the Byzantine world, via trees, simply to get a better understanding of
the history of the physical environment itself and how human actions have

28
Alexandra Gogou et al., “Climate variability and socio-environmental changes in the
northern Aegean (NE Mediterranean) during the last 1500 years,” Quaternary Science
Reviews 136 (2016): 218.
29
Gogou et al., 221–222.
30
Ioannes Telelis, “Medieval Warm Period and the Beginning of the Little Ice Age in the
Eastern Mediterranean: An Approach of Physical and Anthropogenic Evidence,” in Byzanz
Als Raum, ed. K. Belke et al. (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 2000), 223–243; Florin Curta, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, c. 500 to
1050: the Early Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 210.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

altered it. Learning about woodland and its recession, growth, and the
changing proportions of trees within it can tell us much about the dyna-
mism of Mediterranean vegetation.
Such a focus on Quercus and Olea, which makes use of archaeological
and environmental data, enables this book to construct some arguments
that run against what previous scholarship has postulated. While many
Byzantinists have promoted the notion that Byzantines viewed the lands
outside of their fields as scary desert or unprofitable waste, this book takes
the opposite stance, claiming that it looked very different, with woodland
being more prominent than usually thought, that the boundaries between
cultivated and woodland were not always clear, and that people had a
fruitful relationship with such spaces.31 In one vein, this book tells a story
about people interacting with their woodland that was not based on
thoughtless exploitation or irreversible destruction. Furthermore, this
work argues that Byzantine peasants followed relatively labor-saving rela-
tions with such environments until the elite reasserted themselves in the
eleventh century and drove the general Byzantine population to pursue
more laborious surplus-yielding agriculture. Much like some of the histo-
rians above have argued, this book proposes that woodland species such as
pine and oak did very well at expanding their presence in the depopulated
countryside of the seventh through ninth centuries. However, it elabo-
rates on these scholarly assertions by emphasizing that middle Byzantines
in the following centuries worked with these arboreal landscapes differ-
ently than their predecessors had done in the ancient world, even privileg-
ing deciduous oak amidst the clearances that accompanied the economic
growth of the later tenth and eleventh centuries in the Byzantine Aegean
Basin. Further, it argues that the olive, far from being a constant feature of
Aegean rural life, for the most part ceased to receive agricultural mainte-
nance from many Byzantines in the Aegean littoral between the seventh
and tenth centuries. This book suggests that it became alternatively feral,
a source of fuel, or a provider of leaf fodder. Around the year 1000 Olea’s

31
For a notable exception to this negative viewpoint, see A. Dunn, “Rural Producers and
Markets: Aspects of the Archaeological and Historiographic Problem,” in Material Culture
and Well-Being in Byzantium (400–1453), ed. Michael Grunbärt et al. (Vienna: Verlag der
Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2007), 107. For a critique of Geyer’s claim,
see Archibald Dunn’s review of The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through
the Fifteenth Century in Speculum 80, no. 2 (2005): 617. Dunn notes that Geyer did not
address the significant contributions of various studies on the post-late antique landscape
that actually reflect increases in arboreal cover and a lack of erosion.
16 A. OLSON

status grew once again, and its return is used to shed light on monastic
economies that sought sizeable quantities of oil for lighting with a second-
ary need for diet, and on peasant economies that sought to obtain a few
coins by means of a couple of tree’s worth of oil in order to meet demands
from a reinvigorated Byzantine monetary economy and tax-­extracting state.
The chronological boundaries of this study are the mid-seventh and
mid-twelfth centuries. The mid-seventh century is a definite starting point
for the greatly simplified material culture that accompanied the Byzantine
“dark ages,” and that represented a changed interaction with the environ-
ment from that of Late Antiquity. Thus, the mid-seventh century consti-
tutes a logical beginning for this work. The terminus of the project is the
mid-twelfth century, a time by which the Athonite monastic archival
sources with which this book works had become less ample compared to
the preceding centuries, and it is also a time when an important piece of
provincial hagiography, the Life of Nikon, which this work draws upon for
studying the region of Lakonia, was completed.32 Furthermore, after the
mid-twelfth century the Byzantine world began to fragment, becoming
more difficult to treat as a conceptual whole.
This work uses a wide-ranging set of sources, given that this book treats
a broadly construed region over several centuries. The challenge for any-
one approaching such a topic is that Byzantine texts of almost any type,
whether a saint’s life, a chronicle, or a document from a monastic archive,
were rarely written with the intention of directly addressing peoples’ inter-
action with the environment.33 Like any Byzantine social or economic his-
torian, I have read Byzantine texts in an effort to find information on a
topic that most Byzantine authors did not intend to be a focus of their
work. These snippets of information pertaining to trees, woodland, or
olive oil will compile a general picture of these subjects, especially when
combined with archaeological and environmental data.
Monastic archival documents are very important to this work, and
underpin much of the analysis in Chaps. 5, 6, and 7, and to a lesser extent

32
For the composition of Nikon’s vita, see Pamela Armstrong, “Merchants of Venice at
Sparta in the 12th Century,” in Sparta and Laconia: from Prehistory to Pre-Modern, ed.
W. G. Cavanagh, C. Gallou, and M. Georgiadis, British School at Athens Studies 16
(London: Short Run Press, 2009), 317.
33
A notable exception is the eleventh-century courtier and judge Michael Attaleiates who
demonstrated a remarkable interest in natural phenomena in his text, the History. Another
example is the Geoponika, a tenth-century agrarian treatise briefly discussed below.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

in Chap. 3.34 Such sources have limitations and are distorted geographi-
cally and socially, the majority dealing with the region of the Chalkidike in
northern Greece, and, of course, with monks. Despite these limitations,
these sources are useful, often detailing elements of village and monastic
landholdings and activities (even if they are presented through the hege-
monic lens of the monasteries), thereby making such sources practical for
accessing broader Byzantine peasant interactions with the environment. I
contend that the peasants discussed in these archival sources, often from
the villages of Siderokausia and Hierissos, were not unusual: they simply
had unusual neighbors in the large and powerful Athonite monastic houses
that produced these surviving documents.
Another form of textual evidence that this book utilizes are provincial
saints’ lives, called vitae.35 Such sources, like the monastic archival ones,
34
For the Chalkidike peninsula, Actes de Lavra, eds. Paul Lemerle, André Guillou, Nicolas
Svoronos, and Denise Papachryssanthou, vol. I, Archives de l’Athos 5 (Paris: P. Lethielleux,
1970); Actes d’Iviron, eds. Jacques LeFort, Nicolas Oikonomides, and Denise
Papachryssanthou, vol. I Archives de l’Athos 14 (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1985); Actes d’Iviron,
eds. Jacques LeFort, Nicolas Oikonomides, and Denise Papachryssanthou, Vassiliki Kravari,
and Hélène Métrévéli, vol. II Archives de l’Athos 16 (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1985); Actes du
Prôtaton, ed. Denise Papachryssanthou, Archives de l’Athos 7 (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1975);
Actes de Vatopédi, eds. Jacques Bompaire, Jacques LeFort, Vassiliki Kravari, and Christophe
Giros, vol. I, Archives de l’Athos 21 (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 2001); Actes d’Esphigmenou, ed.
Jacques LeFort, Archives de l’Athos 3 (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1973); Actes de Xenophon, ed.
Denise Papachryssanthou, Archives de l’Athos 15 (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1986). Hereafter, I
refer to these texts as Actes de Lavra, Actes d’Iviron I, Actes d’Iviron II, Actes du Prôtaton,
Actes de Vatopédi, Actes d’Esphigmenou, and Actes de Xenophon respectively. For Lakonia and
Southwestern Boiotia, there are a few typika contained in Thomas, John, and Angela
Constantinides Hero, eds., Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete
Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments, 5 vols. Dumbarton Oaks
Studies 35 (Washington, DC, 2000); for the lower Maiandros valley, there are typika in the
said volumes edited by Thomas and Hero, and additional monastic documents for the
region’s monasteries (especially those of Latros) are available in Franz Miklosich, and Joseph
Müller, eds., Acta et diplomatica graeca medii aevi sacra et profana, 6 vols. (Vienna,
1860–1890).
35
For Lakonia, Dennis Sullivan, ed. The Life of Saint Nikon: Text, Translation, and
Commentary (Brookline, MA, 1987). For Boeotia, The Life and Miracles of St. Luke, trans.
Carolyn Connors and Robert Connors (Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1994). For
the lower Maiandros, see The Life of Lazaros of Mt. Galesion: An Eleventh-Century Pillar
Saint, trans. Richard P. H. Greenfield, Byzantine Saints Lives in Translation 3 (Washington,
DC, 2000); Life of Paul of Latros, ed. Hippolyte Delehaye, “Der Latmos,” in Milet: Ergebnisse
der Ausgrabungen und Untersuchungen seit dem Jahre 1899 3.1, ed. Theodor Wiegand
(Berlin, 1913). Hereafter, I refer to these texts as Life of Nikon, Life of Luke, Life of Lazaros,
and Life of Paul, respectively.
18 A. OLSON

present challenges to those trying to interpret them because these texts

adhered closely to a specific set of literary conventions.36 But, one cannot
be dismissive of the vitae as completely rhetorical works, and these texts,
despite their limitations, have some notable benefits for analyzing regional
economies and cultures. Often the hagiographer knew the vita’s subject
personally and was writing for an audience that was familiar with experi-
ences, stories, anecdotes, and landscapes from the saint’s life.37 Thus,
when we see events and descriptions that do not conform to the typical
model of a saint’s life, we can be sure that we are getting some real
Byzantine social history.38
Other documents, such as chronicles and legal texts, are used when
they can assist in answering this work’s questions. In some cases, they do
not neatly overlap with this book’s geography, but their utilization makes
sense because they still present helpful observations about Byzantines’
society, economy, and their interaction with the environment. Scholars
familiar with Byzantium may find it odd that the text known as the
Geoponika is practically absent in this book. This absence is deliberate
because that particular text is a tenth-century compilation of ancient
authors’ statements regarding agriculture, thereby representing Byzantine
classicism and not environment or economy as they were in the middle
Byzantine Aegean Basin.39 In fact, many literary sources from elite
Byzantine culture are not explicitly treated in this book for this reason.
Another important set of Byzantine sources that are absent from this book
is artwork: as Henry Maguire noted in his important work on Byzantine

36
For example, in hagiographical works it was imperative that the saintly protagonist pur-
sue an ascetic life for a period (which was analogous to Christ’s forty days in the desert) in
order for the saint to return to the world with no more weakness of the flesh. In this form,
the saint could be an agent of God. Other key elements had to be included, such as a miracle
at birth, a precocious desire to pursue the ascetic life, a sweet smell upon the saint’s death,
and posthumous miracles. See Mark Whittow, The Making of Byzantium, 600–1025 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 12.
37
Rosemary Morris, Monks and Laymen in Byzantium, 843–1118 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 60, 69–70.
38
Whittow, 13–14.
39
For the text’s probable commissioning at the behest of the Emperor Konstantinos VII
(r. 913–959), see Alan Harvey, “The middle Byzantine economy: growth or stagnation?”
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 19 (1995): 243. For further discussion of the various
Byzantine elite figures who made use of the text for their purposes (such as beautifying a
garden), see John L. Teall, “The Byzantine Agricultural Tradition,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers
25 (1971): 42–44.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

artistic and literary treatments of nature, middle Byzantine illustrations

depicted plants vaguely and one cannot tell what type of vegetation is sup-
posed to be portrayed in a given piece of art.40 While many scholars in the
environmental humanities have centered their analysis on humans’ percep-
tion, representation, or description of the environment (which invites the
study of elite literature and artwork), this work emphasizes material condi-
tions and humans’ physical interaction with woodland as its focus.41 This
prioritization has shaped my choice of sources.
This book makes extensive use of archaeological surveys because they
reveal important historical aspects of the countryside, such as settlement
presence, density, and location.42 Material from archaeological excavations
will also occur in this work, because such information can reveal other
facets of the human-environment interaction, such as building materials or
remains from peoples’ diets.

40
Henry Maguire, Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012). Maguire’s book provides an excellent overview of how
Byzantine culture’s interaction with nature changed between Late Antiquity and the tenth
century, however, as Maguire noted, his book was not focusing on how Byzantines physically
worked with the natural environment (see page 3). For Byzantines’ nonspecific depiction of
plants and trees, see pages 8 and 133–134.
41
For an overview of approaches to medieval environmental history, see Hoffmann, espe-
cially 12–14. For examples of this focus in Byzantine scholarship, see Veronica della Dora,
Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2016).
42
This following list is by no means exhaustive. For Lakonia, see Pamela Armstrong, “The
Survey Area in the Byzantine and Ottoman Periods,” in Continuity and Change in a Greek
Rural Landscape: The Laconia Survey, ed. William Cavanagh et al., vol. 1, 2 vols., Annual of
the British School at Athens, Supplementary Volume 26 (London British School at Athens,
2002), 339–402. For Boiotia, see John Bintliff, Phil Howard, and Anthony Snodgrass,
Testing the Hinterland: The Work of the Boeotia Survey (1989–1991) in the Southern Approaches
to the City of Thespiai, McDonald Institute Monographs (Cambridge: McDonald Institute
for Archaeological Research, 2007); Bintliff, J. L. and A. M. Snodgrass. “The Cambridge/
Bradford Boeotian Expedition: the first four years.” Journal of Field Archaeology 12 (1985):
123–161; For the Argolid see Michael H. Jameson, Curtis N. Runnels, and Tjeerd H. van
Andel, A Greek Countryside: The Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1994); Tjeerd H. van Andel and Curtis Runnels, Beyond the
Acropolis: A Rural Greek Past (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1987). For
the Maiandros Valley, see Hans Lohmann, “Survey in Der Chora von Milet: Vorbericht über
die Kampagnen der Jahre 1996 und 1997,” Archäologischer Anzeiger, no. 3 (1999):
439–473; Helmut Brückner, “Geomorphologie und Paläo-Environment der Milesia,”
Archäologischer Anzeiger, no. 2 (1995): 330–333.
20 A. OLSON

Finally, this book uses pollen studies as a body of sources for analyzing
woodland’s composition in the Aegean Basin between the seventh and
twelfth centuries. A description of pollen studies and their analytical ben-
efits and drawbacks will receive extended treatment in Chap. 3. For now,
suffice it to say that this technique is a well-established, and widely utilized
method for studying and reconstructing past environments. Indeed, if we
want to properly appreciate the significance of environmental changes in
Byzantium, we need to take a longer-term view of the stage on which our
story unfolded than many historians will be used to taking, and will
accordingly have to work with the testimonies of lakebeds and the pollen
that can be found in them. For the Aegean littoral, a handful of useful
studies are available.43 Dendrochronological (dating wood via analysis of
tree rings) and archaeofaunal (analysis of animal bones) evidence supple-
ment the pollen studies where possible.
For the Aegean Basin, the available and often overlapping, textual,
archaeological, and environmental proxy sources lead to a preponderance
of specific locales in this book: Lakonia, the Argolid, eastern Attika, south-
western Boeotia, the Chalkidike peninsula, and a strip of territory in
southwestern Anatolia that includes the Maiandros and Kaystros river val-
leys. For the purpose of studying Byzantium, this approach to the Empire’s
geography is beneficial because it provides an opportunity to look for

43
For the Argolid, see Susanne Jahns, “On the Holocene Vegetation History of the Argive
Plain (Peloponnese, Southern Greece),” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 2, no. 4
(1993): 187–203. For Attika, see Katerina Kouli, “Vegetation Development and Human
Activities in Attiki (SE Greece) during the Last 5000 Years,” Vegetation History and
Archaeobotany 21, no. 4–5 (2012): 267–278. For the Chalkidike, see S. Bottema,
“Palynological investigations in Greece with special reference to pollen as an indicator of
human activity,” Palaeohistoria 24 (1985): 257–289; Sampson Panajiotidis, “Palynological
Investigation of the Tristinika Marsh in Halkidiki (North-Central Greece): A Vegetation
History of the Last Three and One-Half Millennia,” in Mines, Olives and Monasteries: Aspects
of Halkidiki’s Environmental History, ed. Basil C. Gounaris (Thessaloniki: Epikentro
Publishers and Pharos Books, 2015), 303–322. For the lower Maiandros valley, see
M. Knipping, M. Mullenhof, and H. Bruckner, “Human induced landscape changes around
Bafa Gölü (Western Turkey),” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17 (2007): 365–380.
For southwestern Anatolia, see Marleen Vermoere, Holocene Vegetation History in the
Territory of Sagalassos (Southwest Turkey): A Palynological Approach (Turnhout: Brepols,
2004); W. J. Eastwood, N. Roberts, H. F. Lamb, J. C. Tibby, “Holocene environmental
change in southwest Turkey: a palaeoecological record of lake and catchment-related
changes.” Quaternary Science Reviews 18 (1999): 671–695.
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

overall patterns and connections in Byzantine society and culture, while

remaining appreciative of regional variation. There was plenty of ecologi-
cal and regional diversity in the Byzantine world, and this diversity both
enables and invites comparative study within the medieval Roman Empire,
and it can make our understanding of Byzantine history that much richer,
moving away from an overly palace-centered view. Further information on
these locales is presented in Chaps. 2 and 3 as they crop up in the discussion.
This book adopts some methodology and arguments that may appear
bold or perhaps speculative given the paucity of the evidence. That said,
any conclusion regarding Byzantine social, economic, or environmental
history, will appear speculative because of the lack of sources for those
aspects of Byzantium’s history. If historians work strictly on the basis of
the surviving Byzantine texts that tangentially touched on the economy,
then they will be constricted to discussions of fiscal assessments, the tax
status of the peasantry, and the number of oxen that peasant families
owned (or did not own). But if one wishes to understand how Byzantines
interacted with their landscape, or what Byzantine peasants’ economic
strategies were, or how much of a given agricultural product a monastery
consumed, then one must utilize different types of sources, such as oaks
and olives, and make use of some temporal comparisons in order to better
understand what is possible with such trees. Consequently, at times, this
book will go past the bounds of the mid-seventh and mid-twelfth centu-
ries, even going beyond Byzantine evidence altogether, making use of
material and examples drawn from ancient Greece, the western
Mediterranean in the ancient Roman period, pre-industrial Greece, and
even pre-modern California. The justification for roaming in this fashion
is simple: interactions between people and oaks and olives are predicated
on botanical characteristics that are relatively consistent across time and
space, and thus examples from other periods and locales can provide
insight into the actions and motivations of Byzantine actors when working
with those trees. Such digressions are meant to shed light on aspects of
Byzantine history when pertinent Byzantine sources are unavailable or
minimal.
This work makes generalizations about Byzantine society, its environ-
ment, and the ways in which the two interacted. Small pieces of evidence,
taken from regions as diverse and far apart as Lakonia and the Chalkidike,
are put together to argue that overarching processes took place across the
22 A. OLSON

landscape of the Aegean littoral between 650 and 1150. These generaliza-
tions are meant to present a story, and the goal is to show large-scale
trends and transformations. We know that after the sixth century, the
Byzantine world witnessed a decline in rural sites, shrinking urban centers,
a marked decline in pollen for certain types of human-encouraged species
(such as vines and olives), a surge in naturally occurring arboreal pollen, a
dramatic drop in coin circulation, and the emergence of a state service elite
that had little apparent interest in estates or agriculture. The society that
lived in this world had to have lived very differently than those that came
before or followed. Generalizations and synthesis of disparate information
are required in order to explain how that society interacted with the
Aegean Basin’s environment.
The organization of this book is as follows. Chapter 2 provides a snap-
shot of the economy and the interaction between people and the environ-
ment in the Aegean littoral right before the period that this book
examines. It establishes, largely in agreement with other scholarship, that
the economic system and cultural priorities of the eastern Roman Empire
in Late Antiquity had profound impacts on ordering the countryside,
driving people to produce and consume massive quantities of cereal,
wine, olive oil, wood, and meat. Once this culture and economy under-
went a major upheaval and disappeared in the seventh century, the land-
scape changed accordingly. The third chapter examines how the
environment responded to these economic and cultural shifts and how
people worked within that transformed environment. It argues that cer-
tain species, such as pine and oak, took over much of the Aegean littoral’s
landscape and that the region’s inhabitants adopted strategies that meshed
well with these species, strategies that embraced usufruct and the use of
materials obtained in woodland. Chapter 4 is the chronological compan-
ion of the second chapter, but it concentrates on the olive and how that
particular tree’s relationship with humans changed after the seventh cen-
tury, as people produced much less olive oil than before, but also used the
tree differently. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 focus on the period between the late
tenth and mid-twelfth centuries. The fifth and sixth chapters examine
how social and economic changes in the Byzantine Aegean resulted in
modest changes in woodland composition, with people privileging oak
amidst other clearance and bringing back the olive in a piecemeal fashion.
The roles of these trees in the landscape and people’s imaginations receive
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

elaboration there. The final chapter looks at the changing landscape in

the eleventh and twelfth centuries through the lens of monastic archives
and hagiography, arguing that the social, economic, and environmental
changes of this period led to a clash between how peasant villages and
monastic communities used the land. It also resulted in monastic writers
using their saintly subjects as claimants to locales in this more conflicted
society.
 CHAPTER 2

Middle Byzantium’s Environmental

and Economic Antecedents

Abstract This chapter examines the Aegean Basin’s economy, culture,

and environment around the year 600 AD so that the reader can appreci-
ate what was different about the middle Byzantine society, economy, and
landscape that followed Late Antiquity. It presents archaeologists’ and his-
torians’ findings: that the Aegean Basin’s landscape in Late Antiquity con-
sisted of large cities, numerous rural sites, and intensive agriculture. This
context possessed an exchange network that shipped coins, olive oil, wine,
and cereal between urban centers: to provision the army; provision the
urban masses in large cities; to supply the elite; and to pay taxes. The chap-
ter then outlines archaeological findings demonstrating the breakdown of
the Aegean’s exchange networks in the seventh century, the shrinking of
cities, and the disappearance of most rural sites.

Keywords Roman east • Late Antiquity • Economy • Environmental

history • Aegean Sea

For the purposes of this book, it is important to briefly examine what the
interaction between the economy, society, culture, and the physical envi-
ronment looked like in the late antique (third-sixth century) Aegean
Basin. This chapter follows the premise that any attempt to understand the
human-environment interaction in Middle Byzantium will benefit from a

© The Author(s) 2020 25

A. Olson, Environment and Society in Byzantium, 650-1150,
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59936-2_2
26 A. OLSON

comparison with the same interaction in Late Antiquity. In order to pro-

vide an image of how people fashioned their landscape in the late antique
Aegean Basin, the accompanying section integrates the historiography of
the Eastern Roman Empire’s economy with specific archaeological and
environmental evidence from the Aegean littoral. In other words, this
chapter does not innovate so much as summarize what historians and
archaeologists have found. Having done so, it will help the reader appreci-
ate the remainder of the book which devotes its attention to what was
different about the middle Byzantine economy, society, and environment
that followed the much better studied late antique one.
The general impression of the Eastern Roman Empire’s economy
throughout Late Antiquity is that of a large population of peasants and
slaves who produced vast quantities of cereal, wine, olive oil, pottery,
meat, and other agricultural products. These products then proceeded
along exchange networks and were sold to obtain coins with which to pay
taxes and rents. Alternatively, they were redistributed to various recipients:
the large urban populations that characterized this period; the Roman
army; or to enable the Empire’s elite to consume conspicuously. This char-
acterization of Late Antiquity’s economy and society in the eastern
Mediterranean is not novel; rather it is an image that recent scholarship
consistently describes. However, the environmental consequences of this
economy deserve further explanation. In essence, Late Antiquity’s society
and economy created and perpetuated an ecosystem that consisted of a
patchwork of large cities surrounded by massive numbers of rural sites,
fields, vineyards, olive groves, deciduous oak woodlots, and orchards of
fruit- and nut-bearing trees.
Due to a combination of factors, namely decline in population, a weak-
ened state apparatus that was less able to redistribute bulk commodities,
an aristocracy less interested in large building projects, and a reduced mar-
ket, Byzantine society and its state became less demanding of its physical
environment during the seventh century. While these general develop-
ments are familiar to historians of this period of Byzantine history, the
archaeological consequences, which add crucial details to this picture, are
less well known. Such archaeological consequences included the shrinking
of urban centers, the breakdown of exchange networks, and the shift to a
countryside that had almost archaeologically invisible rural sites. Having
established these historical and archeological transitions, this chapter will
propose (as some scholars have done for other parts of the postclassical
world) that within this transformed landscape, the landowning elite and
 2 MIDDLE BYZANTIUM’S ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC ANTECEDENTS 27

their demands for resources had basically disappeared and that Byzantine
peasants engaged in less exacting relationships with the natural environ-
ment than their ancient predecessors had done, shifting from a relatively
intense agricultural economy driven by the late antique landowners and
Roman state to a more autarkic economy that attributed greater impor-
tance to meeting peasants’ caloric needs and desire to avoid extra work. Or
as the medievalist Chris Wickham’s model may suggest, Byzantium’s
economy in the early medieval period came to resemble a peasant mode of
production that was based on communities providing a very limited sur-
plus and making use of local resources in a labor-saving fashion. I believe
that by keeping the ancient Roman economy in mind, one can obtain a
better understanding of the degree to which peasants were “coerced” or
“incentivized,” depending on the peasant or one’s perspective, into pro-
viding surplus production.1 More recent scholarly works have demon-
strated that, once this ancient Roman state and its economy disappeared,
there were varying, and important, environmental changes across the
Mediterranean’s surrounding landscapes.

Taxes and Rents, Olives and Vines, Slaves and Cattle

Between the fourth and early seventh centuries, the economy of the
Eastern Mediterranean intensified, largely under the influence of the new
Imperial Capital of Constantinople. Such economic changes had impor-
tant repercussions for the local landscapes throughout the Eastern portion
of the Roman Empire, including those that surrounded the Aegean Sea.
The debate about the extent and character of the ancient economy remains
a lively one, and its questions, such as how growth-oriented this economy
was, or to what extent the Roman state’s demands versus the profit-­seeking
aspirations of individuals drove it, continue to animate the discussion.2
Despite this debate’s vigor, there is a general agreement among scholars
that the third- to seventh-century economy in the eastern portion of the
Roman world, which scholars alternatively refer to as “Late Antique” or

1
These terms are the most useful ones I have come across for understanding social and
economic dynamics in the Byzantine (and for that matter, pre-modern) world. See Neville,
Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 1, for their use in describing provincial social relations in Byzantium.
2
For a concise explanation of the life that this debate has taken on, see Richard Saller,
“Framing the Debate over Growth in the Ancient Economy,” in The Ancient Economy, ed.
Walter Scheidel and Sitta Von Reden (New York: Routledge, 2002), 251–269.
28 A. OLSON

“Late Roman” or “Early Byzantine,” was a large and heavily monetized

one. The archaeological work of the last few decades has only reinforced
this view. While debate continues around the questions mentioned earlier,
for the purposes of this book, it is enough to acknowledge that Roman
hegemony facilitated interregional trade and bulk exchange in several
ways. First, it underpinned the existence of a wealthy elite who owned
land across the Mediterranean, dominated large numbers of slaves and
tenant farmers, and required considerable material wealth in order to carry
on their own conspicuous consumption, display their status, and meet
their financial obligations. Second, via its road networks and its practical
monopolization of violence on the Mediterranean Sea, Roman hegemony
made it easier to move goods from one part of the Mediterranean littoral
to another, thereby facilitating trade and taxation.3 Third, the Roman
Empire demanded hefty taxes, sometimes in coins and sometimes in kind,
in order to maintain its army, bureaucracy, and the unique privileges of the
Roman and Constantinopolitan urban populations via the state-sponsored
annona (a system that redistributed food either for free or at a subsidized
price to designated members of these urban populations).4 These respec-
tive beneficiaries of Roman rule often resided a considerable distance away
from the areas that produced this food, and thus, via their demands and
entitlement, helped drive bulk exchange. These key factors combined, as
Keith Hopkins persuasively argued in his influential works, to promote a
certain degree of economic growth in the Roman world. Basically, in order
to pay taxes and rents owed to the Roman state and its elite, people had to
produce a surplus and engage in some level of trade in order to obtain the

3
For the Roman state’s ability to make trade more secure, particularly through the removal
of piracy in the Mediterranean, see Keith Hopkins, “Rome, Taxes, Rents and Trade,” in The
Ancient Economy, ed. Walter Scheidel and Sitta Von Reden (New York: Routledge,
2002), 219.
4
For a good introductory description of the annona in the city of Rome in this period, see
Bertrand Lançon, Rome in Late Antiquity: Everyday Life and Urban Change, AD 312–609,
trans. Antonia Nevill (New York: Routledge, 2001), 46 and 119. The subsidized distribution
to the urban populace of Constantinople was more modest than that of Rome, but signifi-
cant nonetheless, see Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, AD 284–430 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 122. For a discussion of the massive numbers of ships
required for the annona in Constantinople in Late Antiquity, see Michael McCormick, The
Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 86–92 and 101–114.
 2 MIDDLE BYZANTIUM’S ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC ANTECEDENTS 29

necessary coins.5 Such trade went well beyond small-scale transport of

luxury items to colossal-scale trafficking of basic commodities such as
grain, olive oil, wine, pork, and pottery.
Similar to Hopkins’ model, and specifically treating the late antique
eastern Mediterranean, Jairus Banaji has argued for a picture of a broad, if
not direct, intervention in the ancient economy on the part of the Imperial
apparatus.6 Essentially, Banaji argues that because of a heightened imperial
effort to circulate a greater quantity of gold coinage during the fourth and
fifth centuries, the eastern Roman Empire experienced an upsurge in
intensive agriculture. This argument emphasizes the investment of gold
into the countryside for the production of olive oil, wine, grain, and fruit,
specifically for the purpose of obtaining a return on investment in the form
of profit.7 An alleged rise in population accompanied this growing econo-
my.8 Indeed, archaeologists and historians now generally view the eastern
Mediterranean as a busy, heavily human-populated, and intensively worked
region in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, with the discoveries of
widespread agriculture and inhabitation in the Levant’s Negev desert per-
haps constituting the best-known example of this image.9
More recent multidisciplinary work centered on Sagalassos, an ancient
urban center located in the uplands of southwestern Asia Minor, has fur-
nished an informative snapshot of what a local landscape looked like in the
busy countryside of the late antique eastern Mediterranean. Archaeological
surveys that incorporate significant environmental data reveal that the
city’s hinterland was heavily worked in the first six centuries that it was
under Roman rule, and that Roman hegemony brought with it a new
agricultural regime. Archaeologists and palynologists have found evidence
of intensive olive cultivation around Sagalassos, for there are remains of
many olive presses and of fossilized olive pollen from around the city,
5
Hopkins, 208–209. While Hopkins’ argument focuses on material from the Republic and
Principate, his model is applicable to the Empire in Late Antiquity.
6
Jairus Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic
Dominance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jairus Banaji, Agrarian History and
the Labour Organization of Byzantine Large Estates (Oxford: Published for the British
Academy by Oxford University Press, 1999).
7
Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity, 218–219.
8
Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity, Chaps. 7 and 8.
9
First made well-known among specialists in G. Tchalenko, Villages antiques de la Syrie du
Nord. Le Massif de Bélus à l’époque romaine, 3 vols. (Paris, 1958). For more recent treatment
of this subject, see Michael Decker, Tilling the Hateful Earth: Agricultural Production and
Trade in the Late Antique East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
30 A. OLSON

despite its high elevation; an elevation that typically discourages people

from growing olives due to the possibility of frosts that will severely dam-
age the trees.10 Indeed, this is a region in which the olive is entirely absent
today and was also fairly rare in Hellenistic times. Like olives, cattle became
more numerous in the area as it was integrated into the Roman economy.
Analysis of the faunal remains at Sagalassos have shown that during the
ancient Roman period, there was a steady rise in the proportion of cattle
around Sagalassos at the expense of sheep and goats.11 Cattle of course
required fodder and, unlike sheep and goats, simply could not feed them-
selves on “marginal” lands, thus requiring people to set aside further space
in order to cultivate it for animal feed.12 The greater allotment of land for
the cultivation of grain means that, in turn, there would also be more
people using cattle for farming purposes in order to farm that land.13 It has
also been conjectured that a significant proportion of these large numbers
of cattle may have lugged clay from the nearby valley of Çanaklı to
Sagalassos where the clay was accordingly mass-produced into red slipware
pottery that was then exported throughout central Anatolia.14
Such dynamics as the interplay of olives, cereal, cattle, and clay at
Sagalassos, characterizes the ancient Roman period in the region, and
highlights the relationship between the ancient economy and the environ-
ment in which it was situated. People, notably those who could tolerate
the risk of frosts killing their olives at such high elevations, were using
resources such as clay and olives to create products, many of which trav-
eled well beyond their immediate surroundings for the purpose of
exchange. Such industry and transport also required more of a certain
species of animal (cattle), which in turn required more land to be cleared
in order to feed that particular species. Fundamentally, intensification led
to further intensification in the case of Sagalassos. This case was not excep-
tional. For instance, studies of the sediment in the Maiandros River,

10
Marleen Vermoere, Holocene Vegetation History in the Territory of Sagalassos (Southwest
Turkey): A Palynological Approach (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 242.
11
Bea De Cupere, Animals at Ancient Sagalassos. Evidence of the Faunal Remains
(Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 141. The study emphasized that the proportion of pigs
in the faunal finds remained constant from the first to the early seventh century, whereas the
proportion of sheep and goats changed considerably against that of cattle.
12
De Cupere, 174.
13
De Cupere, 141.
14
De Cupere, 141; Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the
Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 715.
 2 MIDDLE BYZANTIUM’S ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC ANTECEDENTS 31

located on the other side of the uplands that lie to the west of Sagalassos,
have demonstrated that the late antique period saw the greatest amount of
human influence of any layer, with hefty quantities of olive and vine pol-
len, charcoal, and ceramic in the deposits.15 These cases from the late
antique Anatolian context represent illustrative examples of how cities in
the Roman Empire were linked into a broader interregional trade net-
work, and how this link drove changes in how local people interacted with
their physical environment, and in the composition of that environment’s
crops and fauna.
Across the Aegean, one sees a similar situation of regional exchange
networks driving local landscape change, this time in a coastal context,
specifically in the environs of the Southern Argolid between the third and
sixth centuries. Thanks to another case of impressive archaeological survey
work that included environmental data, it is apparent that economic
growth in the Southern Argolid, beginning in the third century, peaked in
the fifth and sixth, with important results for the local landscape. Indeed,
this particular period left more sites of human settlement in this locale
than at any other time aside from the late classical era, along with 14 olive
crushers.16 Beyond the impressive number of rural sites and the evidence
of intensive oleiculture, this region’s late antique landscape includes sev-
eral kilns that produced amphorae (in addition to bricks and roof tiles).
Oddly, these kilns were located in coastal sites that had no good-quality
clay, or at least none that was readily accessible. The archaeologists who
conducted this study wondered if the clay was brought in as ballast by
ships that were intending to take finished products, such as cereals or wine
or olive oil, back to a different market.17 Such a situation is at home in this
late antique context, a scenario in which products were sought in bulk,
and the ships that arrived with mainly empty holds found it worthwhile to
move another bulk product in the process in order to fulfill a demand (for

15
Helmut Brückner, “Geomorphologie und Paläo-Environment der Milesia,”
Archäologischer Anzeiger, no. 2 (1995): 329–330.
16
Tjeerd H. van Andel and Curtis Runnels, Beyond the Acropolis: A Rural Greek Past
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1987), 113–115. For a more in-depth dis-
cussion of the sites, see Michael H. Jameson, Curtis N. Runnels, and Tjeerd H. van Andel,
A Greek Countryside: The Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1994), 255–256. See pages 400–401 for second-order sites
increasing from 6 in number to 16, and for third-order sites increasing in number from 17
to 82 in the fifth and sixth centuries.
17
van Andel and Runnels, 115–116.
32 A. OLSON

pottery and tiles in this case), even if the production of that particular
product was not ideally suited to the locale in which it was crafted.
A more somber element accompanies the evidence of the Southern
Argolid’s busy late antique countryside. A local site, Halieis, has a “Roman
villa rustica” complete with a bathhouse, but also inferior graves for a
work force.18 It is impossible to tell if the deceased were slaves or tenants,
although agricultural slaves were less common in the eastern Mediterranean
than in Italy throughout the Roman era.19 Regardless of these unfortunate
peoples’ legal status, it is clear that this economy was a surplus-producing
and export-driven one that left copious material remains for posterity, but
also required substantial human labor and suffering in order to operate.
Archaeological surveys from elsewhere in the Aegean littoral, such as
Boiotia, tell similar stories to those of Sagalassos and the Southern Argolid,
finding a rise in the number of rural sites in Late Antiquity and a pursuit
of intensive agriculture. The Boiotia survey’s work on the environs of the
ancient polis of Thespiai, located on the eastern segment of the Helicon
massif in central Greece (but still close to the Aegean Sea),20 has provided
a picture of modest growth between 100 and 200 AD, followed by a sig-
nificant increase in sites, as well as several sites’ sizes, between 200 and
650 AD.21 Notably, there were areas in the western part of Thespiai’s
chora (hinterland), that had not been worked before but that were home
to newly established rural sites between 400 and 650.22 The survey’s
authors note that, based only on archaeological remains, it is impossible to
determine whether these sites were home to peasants tied to the land or to
prosperous independent farmers.23 However, the authors point out that
there is no doubt that the survey’s area around Thespiai had more land set

18
van Andel and Runnels, 115.
19
For slavery in the late antique Roman Empire, see Cameron, 118–121. For slavery in
Byzantium, see Günter Prinzing, “On Slaves and Slavery,” in The Byzantine World, ed. Paul
Stephenson (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 92–102; Youval Rotman, Byzantine
Slavery and the Mediterranean World, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009).
20
John Bintliff, Phil Howard, and Anthony Snodgrass, Testing the Hinterland: The Work of
the Boeotia Survey (1989–1991) in the Southern Approaches to the City of Thespiai, McDonald
Institute Monographs (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2007).
For the site location, see page 95.
21
Bintliff, Howard, and Snodgrass. Pages 175–178 provide a clear summary of this
process.
22
Bintliff, Howard, and Snodgrass, 175.
23
Bintliff, Howard, and Snodgrass, 177.
 2 MIDDLE BYZANTIUM’S ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC ANTECEDENTS 33

aside for agrarian holdings between 400 and 650 than at any time in the
area’s history, suggesting it was for surplus agriculture.24
The nature of late antique archaeological finds throughout the region
that this book treats further reinforces the view that this economy was
suited for surplus production. Archaeologists have noted that many of
these fifth- and sixth-century sites in Greece were geared toward produc-
ing and storing surplus agricultural products because they have little in the
way of domestic remains but possess high levels of discoveries (such as
remains from amphorae) that are associated with storage and shipping.25
Late antique society’s cultural priorities further intensified the interac-
tion between people and their environment. Notables in the Eastern
Roman world, while no longer as closely preoccupied with “evergetism (a
cultural phenomenon that permeated first- and second-century Greek
civic life, whereby members of the local elite spent money on acts that
benefited the local population in return for recognition)” as their prede-
cessors in the Greek polis, still used their influence to significantly alter the
landscape. A consequential example was the sixth-century Milesian rhetor,
Hesychius Illustris, who had worked at the imperial court of Justinian. For
the benefit of his fellow inhabitants of the ancient city of Miletos (situated
at the mouth of the Maiandros River in southwestern Anatolia), Hesychius
utilized his connection with the Emperor Justinian and brought about, by
means of Imperial funding, the diversion of the Maiandros to prevent the
silting of the harbor of Miletos.26
Of course, the culture of the cities in the Greek-speaking portion of the
Roman Empire altered their environment in other ways that were wide-­
ranging, even if less direct than acts such as that of Hesychius. The aristoc-
racy promoted expense and consumption, and patronage of civic structures
and institutions, many of which required wine, olive oil, fuel for baths, and
building materials. And the wealth to fund such consumption (and to

24
Bintliff, Howard, and Snodgrass, 175. For the suggestion of surplus agriculture, see
page 178.
25
John Bintliff, The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th
Century A.D. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 357. For the same work using the term
“Late Roman” to refer to finds from the fifth, sixth and early seventh centuries, see page the
same work, page 351.
26
Clive Foss, “Archaeology and the “Twenty Cities” of Byzantine Asia,” American Journal
of Archaeology 81, no. 4 (1977): 477; Peter Thonemann, The Maeander Valley: A Historical
Geography from Antiquity to Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
315–317.
34 A. OLSON

meet the expenses of civic offices) typically came from agrarian sources.
For it was the local elite of the eastern Mediterranean world in the ancient
period, the town-dwelling elite called the Decurions, who were expected
to spend money on local projects.27 The city governments paid for the
maintenance of aqueducts, public buildings, and baths, and provided for
festivals, and civic events (such as athletic contests), which would include
much food and wine as well.28 Between the third and sixth centuries this
decurial class declined considerably, but their outlays of resources were
simply taken up by new figures such as church or state service officials.29
Thus, while it may be difficult or even impossible to distinguish between
economic or cultural causes of land clearance, choices of crops or types of
livestock, and shipping of agricultural materials, it is clear that the late
antique Aegean Basin was a world typified by the movement of agricul-
tural surplus and the constant effort to perpetuate a landscape that could
meet the needs of those producing surplus within it. This context was pre-­
industrial, but its landscape was thoroughly altered to serve humans’
demands.

A Transformed Economy, Culture, and Environment

In the first half of the seventh century, the state structure, exchange net-
works, and urban centers that had underpinned the late antique economy
collapsed. Byzantium, exhausted after winning a long and destructive war
with its Persian neighbors, lost the bulk of its territory, including the rich
tax bases of Egypt and the Levant, to the emerging Caliphate. This new
political entity, initially appearing from the Arabian Peninsula, used large
armies and naval forces to raid Byzantine territory and seize people and
possessions.30 At the same time Byzantium lost its Balkan possessions too:
the Avar Khanate, a polity created by nomadic warriors, seriously under-
mined Byzantine control of this region in the later sixth and early seventh
centuries. The situation worsened in the early seventh century, as Byzantine
leadership transferred the area’s soldiers east to deal with the ongoing war

27
Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 114–115.
28
Garnsey and Saller, 32–33.
29
For this shift, see Cameron, 8 and 126.
30
For an excellent treatment of these developments, see Whittow, Chap. 4.
 2 MIDDLE BYZANTIUM’S ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC ANTECEDENTS 35

against the Persians.31 Consequently, these undefended Balkan provinces

drifted from the imperial orbit and were partially settled by migrating
Slavic populations, with Byzantium losing its hegemony there for some
time.32 By the end of the seventh century, although the Avars had ceased
to threaten the Empire, a new arrival from the Eurasian steppe, the
Bulgars, had firmly established themselves south of the Danube and well
within what had formerly been Byzantium’s Balkan territory.33
By the year 700, the Roman state was no longer a hegemonic entity
that dominated the Mediterranean world but a polity on life support that
clung to the interior plateau of Anatolia and the coastlands of the Aegean
Sea, sandwiched ominously between two new political entities: the
Umayyad Caliphate and the Bulgar Khanate. The Byzantine state survived
this series of invasions and loss of territory, transforming its military and
government in the process. While the exact timeline and details of these
processes are murky, it is clear that by the year 700 Byzantium’s bureau-
cracy was significantly smaller than that of 600 and was overwhelmingly
deployed in Constantinople.34 The Byzantine army and provincial admin-
istration were now based around the themata, a territorial division
defended by soldiers who lived in these newly created districts. A strategos
oversaw the theme, and commanded both its soldiers and its handful of
civil officials involved in hearing legal cases and collecting taxes.35
This transition was not smooth: several Emperors met violent ends as
soldiers and sailors struggled to place their candidates on the throne.
Nevertheless, the Empire’s situation stabilized and throughout the latter
half of the seventh and much of the eighth centuries, Byzantium success-
fully defended itself against nearly annual raids from the Caliphate, using
its reformed military to guard against numerically superior enemy armies.
The Empire’s government maintained its well-organized and equipped
army and navy, collected taxes, rendered judicial decisions, and staffed
imperial offices. Overlapping these political and military developments,

31
Florin Curta, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, c. 500 to 1050: The Early Middle Ages
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), especially 62–63.
32
Whittow, 75.
33
For more on this topic, see Curta, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, c. 500 to 1050: The
Early Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
34
Neville, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 7.
35
For the theme system and changes in Byzantine society in the seventh century, see:
Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, rev. edition, especially Chap. 6; Neville, Authority
in Byzantine Provincial Society, 7; Whittow, 171–173.
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Screws, Plaster of Paris to Set into Wall, 266
Script on a Trophy Cup, Onlaying, 188
Scrubbing and Floorwork, Caster Board for, 293
Scrubbing, Roller Truck for Use in, 210
Searchlight, Pivoted, Made of Old Milk Strainer, 139
Seat, Automobile, Porch Swing Made from, 425
Seat, Combination Workshop, 370
Seat, Folding Ground, with Back Rest, 190
Seat for Garden Workers, Movable Sunshade and, 148
Seat, Fuel Box in, Filled from Floor Trapdoor, 332
Seat, Hall, with Storage Compartment, 312
Seat, Homemade Spring Wagon, 440
Seat, Rear, for Motorcycle or Bicycle, 446
Seats, Lawn, Built on Tree Stump, 141
Second Handle on Hoe or Rake Saves Stooping, 160
Secret Trinket Case for the Bookshelf, 296
Section Liner, Homemade, 280
Sectional Poultry Fencing, Portable, 329
Sectional Spun-Metal Candlesticks, Repairing, 382
Secure, Making Chest Lock More, 94
Seed-Planting Guide String, Reel for Use with, 422
Seeding Bare Spots on Lawns, 167
Seeing an Alternating Current in a Mirror, 392
Self-Setting Rat Trap, 31
Set of Electric Chimes, 368
Sewing Basket, Hourglass, 137
Sewing Machine, Emery Needle Cushion in, 197
Sewing Machine, Needle Threader for, 134
Sewing Machine, Prevents Soiling Goods After Oiling, 402
Sewing-Machine Thread, Preventing from Tangling, 382
Sewing Rack Attached to Rocker, 291
Sewing Stand with Workbag in Top, 293
Shade and Curtains, Bedroom, Arranged for Thorough Ventilation,
128
Shade, Ideal, Double Roofs Provide for Poultry Coops, 180
Shade-Roller Springs, Repairing, 338
Shade Roller, Toy Submarine Made of, 441
Sharpener, Table-Knife, 22
Sharpening Fiber Phonograph Needles, Device for, 361
Shaving-Brush Holder, 76
Shaving Lamp and Mirror for Camp, 162
Sheath for Hunter’s Knife, Locking, 428
Shed, Double Lock for, 157
Sheepshank Knot Used to Recover Rope, 168
Sheet-Metal Stand for Flatiron, 182
Sheet Music, Tabs for Turning Quickly, 368
Sheets of Paper, Straightening, 456
Sheets, Typewritten Bound, Inserting or Correcting on, 419
Sheets, Uniform Cards or, Aid in Ruling, 420
Shellac Varnish, Receptacle for, 346
Shelves, Wall, Easily Constructed, 108
Shield for Heater in Chick Brooding House, 295
Shielding Pictures from Damp Wall, 338
Shipment, Convenient, Trunk Bookcase for, 217
Ship’s-Wheel Device for a Radiator Valve, 259
Shoe Laces, Frayed, Repaired with Pitch or Wax, 129
Shoe-Polishing Strop, 344
Shoes and Rubbers, Drying Rack for, 454
Shoes, Tan, To Keep from Turning Dark, 377
Shop, Protecting Plans in, 376
Shop Use, Ironing or, Gas-Hose Bracket for, 366
Shortening a Pasteboard Box, 337
Shotgun and How to Use It:
Part I.—How a Shotgun is Made, 55
Part II.—Choke and Pattern of a Gun, 63
Shotgun Shell, Fishing-Tackle Outfit in, 142
Shotgun Shell, Golf Tee Made of, 430
Shoulder-Pack Tent, Homemade, 131
Sideboard Converted into Kitchenette, 192
Sidecar for a Parcel-Delivery Bicycle, 407
Sign, Homemade Gate, with Metal Letters, 451
Signal for Lighted Lights in Basement, 314
Signal Telegraph with Green and Red Lights, 176
Signboard, Antique, Made of Headboard of Bed, 15
Silverware, Cleaning, 158
Simple Barometer, 415
Simple Concealed Locking Device for Cases of Drawers, 4
Sink, Dishwashing, Combination Laundry Tub and, 218
Sink, Old, Installed as Dish-Draining Basin, 452
Sink, Protecting Wall Back of Range or, 354
Sitting Hens, Coop for, 360
Skates, Homemade Roller, 377
Ski Sled, 41
Skill, Marble-Under-Bridge Game of, 298
Skis and Ski Running:
 Part I.—Prominent Types of Modern Skis, 23
Part II.—Running, Jumping and Climbing, 33
Skylight, Portable, for Home Portraiture, 330
Slamming of Door, Rope Pad Prevents, 440
Sled, Folding Ice, 44
Sled, One-Runner, 45
Sled, Ski, 41
Sleeping Tent, Hammock, 242
Sleeve Aids in Distinguishing Gas-Fixture Chains, 247
Slicing Board for Camp or Kitchen, 247
Slide in Top of Drawer, Desk, 356
Slide Tray, Nonbinding Tool-Chest, 371
Slide, Water-Coasting Toboggan and, 183
Sliding Board for Coasting, 14
Sliding Windows, Horizontal, Hinge Lock for, 372
Small Articles, Bench Receptacles for, 350
Small Working Pile Driver, 215
Smoker’s Cabinet or Cellarette, 32
Smoker’s Trays, Morris Chair with Newspaper Rack, 309
Smoking of Lamp Overcome by Increasing Draft, 361
Snake Game, Indian, 388
Snakes Inlaid, Turned Cane with, 325
Snapper-Shell Ash Tray, 68
Snow Blocks Made in Box Form, Fort Built of, 409
Snow, Falling, Taking Photographs in, 140
Snowshoe Toe Clips, Homemade, 418
Socket, Fuse, Inkwell Base Made from, 344
Sockets, Table, for Electrical Heating Apparatus, 396
Sod Cutter, Horse-Drawn, 229
Soiling Goods After Oiling Sewing Machine, Prevents, 402
Solder, Making String, 235
Soldering, Difficult, Alcohol Blowtorch for, 382
Soldier, Compact Toilet Outfit for, 9
Soldiers, Lead, and Similar Small Castings, Making, 455
Soldier’s or Traveler’s Kit for Sundries and Toilet Articles, 453
Sounding Glass, Mystery, 157
Space in Closet, Rigging Economizes, 433
Spacer for Curtain Rings, Cord Used as, 211
Spade Handle, Broken, Repaired with Water Pipe, 242
Spark Plugs, Extra, Box to Protect, 440
Sparks, Electric, Photographing, 399
Specimen Book, Preserving Leaves in, 10
Speed, Pedals for Typewriter Space and Shift Key Increase, 364
Spit, Water Wheel Turns over Campfire, 429
Split-Bamboo Lettering Pen, 142
Split-Bamboo Tray for Top, Folding Table with, 424
Split Needle Causes Echo on Talking Machine, 217
Splitting, Driving Nails to Prevent, 373
Spokes, Wire, in Wheels, Handy Tool for Tightening, 450
Spoon Attachment to Prevent Child from Using Left Hand, 317
Sporting Rifle and How to Use It, 47
Sportsman’s Cabinet for Guns, Equipment and Books, 434
Spray Liquid in Atomizer, Bottle Economizes, 450
Spray Nozzle Made of Acetylene Burner, 248
Spray, Pressure, Made of Old Oilcan, 212
Spring for Porch Swings, Safety, 297
Spring-Roller Curtains, Automatic Stop for, 317
Spring Roost Releases Poultry-House Door Latch, 448
Spring Wagon Seat, Homemade, 440
Springs, Coiled, Winding, 134
Springs, Discarded Buggy, for Diving Board, 429
Springs, for Play Auto, Barrel Staves as, 311
Springs, Opening, for a Tennis-Racket Clamp, 393
Springs, Repairing Shade-Roller, 338
Springy Hammock Supports Made of Boughs, 369
Sprocket Drive, Belt for, Made of Brass Strips, 160
Square Edges on Small Machine Bases, Sandpapering, 418
Squeezing Paste from Tubes, 391
Squirrel-Skin Bill Fold, 265
Stage Use, Player or, Comic Chest Expander for, 429
Stake, Nontangling Pasture, 136
Stand for Flatiron, Sheet-Metal, 182
Stand for Potted Flowers, Turntable, 308
Stand for Test-Tube Flower Vase, 21
Staples, Tinned, for Bell-Circuit Wiring, 420
Star-Kite, Eight-Pointed, 159
Starting Garden Plants, 373
Steam-Propelled Motorcycle Made by Mechanic, 191
Steam Tractor, Model, Made by Boy, 410
Steel Fishing Rods, Enamel for, 349
Steel Wool as Aluminum-Ware Cleaner, 162
Steel Wool, Uses for, 348
Steering Gear, Coaster, Made from Cream-Freezer Drive, 161
Stenciling with Photographic Films, 416
Stepmother for Incubator Chicks, 130
Stick, Mixing, That Breaks Up Lumps, 54
Sticking to Hands, Preventing Putty, 314
Sticks Held in Flooring Groove, Planing Thin, 218
Stool, High, How to Make, 378
Stools, Small, and Foot Rests, Variety of, 261
Stooping, Second Handle on Rake or Hoe Saves, 160
Stop, Bench, 395
Stop for Spring-Roller Curtains, Automatic, 317
Stop, Removable Drawer, 10
Stopper for a Bunghole, 254
Stopper, Oilcan, 349
Stopping Rattle in Motorcycle Stand, 414
Storage Compartment, Hall Seat with, 312
Storage of Camp Equipment, Care and, 304
Storage of Wood for Cabinetwork, 389
Stove, Emergency Alcohol, 350
Stove, Fifty-Cent Electric, 260
Stove, Gas, for the Dining Table, 373
Stove, Gasoline, Denatured Alcohol to Start, 413
Stove Lighter with Feeding Wick Guards Against Burns, 459
Stove, Small Cooking, Economical Use of Wood Alcohol in, 210
Stoves, Emergency Camp, Quickly Made, 449
Straightening Sheets of Paper, 456
Strained Auto-Truck Frame, Reinforcing, 454
Strap, Carrying, and Lock for Hand Cases, 328
Straw Hat, Old, Bird House Made of, 181
Stretcher for Drying Small Fur Hides, 421
Strength of a Giant, Showing, 108
Striking of Clock, Electrical Device Transmits, 14
String-Cutting Ring Made of Horseshoe Nail, 5
String Solder, Making, 235
String, To Uncork a Bottle with, 402
Strips, Device for Corrugating, 421
Strop, Shoe-Polishing, 344
Stump, Ornamenting Old Tree, 123
Stumps, Tree, Lawn Seats Built on, 141
Submarine Camera, 219
Submarine, Toy, Made of Shade Roller, 441
Substitute for Gas-Stove Oven, 45
Substitute for Ground Glass in Camera, 236
Substitute for Rivets in Couches, 371
Suitcase Extension, Homemade, 360
Suitcase Holder for Running Board of Automobile, 329
Summer Camp, Diving Tower for, 274
Summer Radiator Cover Serves as Cupboard in Winter, 297
Summer Veranda, Taborets and Small Tables for, 269
Sundial Plate, Horizontal, Laying Out, 436
Sundries and Toilet Articles, Soldier’s or Traveler’s Kit, 453
Sunshade and Seat, Movable, for Garden Workers, 148
Support for Flower Centerpiece, Wire-Mesh, 344
Support for Wagon Pole Aids in Hooking Up Team, 5
Support, Springy Hammock, Made of Boughs, 369
Sweetheart, Sailor’s, Picture Frame, 268
Swimmers, Webfoot Attachments for, 381
Swing, Child’s, Built of Pipes in Narrow Space, 358
Swing, Circular, 177
Swing Made of Hickory Sapling, 335
Swing, Porch, 167
Swing, Porch, Headrest for, 367
Swing, Porch, Made from Automobile Seat, 425
Swinging Bags on Arms of Scarecrow, 340
Swings, Playground, Bearing for, 276
Swings, Safety Spring for Porch, 297
Switch, Cylinder Reversing, 297
Switch, Lightning, for Wireless Aerials, 415
“Switchboard” Protects Milker from Cow’s Tail, 128
T-Squares, Making, 101
Table, Bird, Cat-Proof, 76
Table Box for Campers, 124
Table, Combination Camp-Kitchen Cabinet and, 126
Table, Dining, Gas Stove for, 373
Table, Folding Card, Handy for Invalid in Bed, 308
Table, Folding, with Split-Bamboo Tray for Top, 424
Table, Ironing Board for Use on, 315
Table, Jig-Saw, for Vise, 93
Table-Knife Sharpener, 22
Table Lamp, Inexpensive, Made of Electrical-Fixture Parts, 127
Table Mats, Asbestos, Reinforced with Wire Netting, 421
Table, Octagonal Mission Center, 7
Table, Old, Used as Wall Workbench, 440
Table, Parlor, 151
Table, Revolving Outdoor Lunch, 363
Table Sockets for Electrical Heating Apparatus, 396
Table Stands for Hot Dishes, Attractive, 210
Table, Window Frame and, for Dark Room, 320
Tables, Small, and Taborets for the Summer Veranda, 269
Taborets and Small Tables for the Summer Veranda, 269
Tabs for Turning Sheet Music Quickly, 368
Take-Down Emergency Oars, 395
Taking Pictures from Kite, Camera for, 52
Talking-Machine Cabinet, Automatic Electric Light on, 162
Talking-Machine Cabinet, Homemade, 310
Talking Machine, Disk, as China Banding Wheel, 10
Talking Machine, Kinks for, 179
Talking-Machine Needles, Uses for Worn, 329
Talking Machine, Record-Cleaning Pad Fixed to, 445
Talking-Machine Records, Disk, Played Eccentrically, 328
Talking-Machine Records, Playing with the Finger Nail, 187
Talking Machine, Split Needle Causes Echo on, 217